Using the notion of generalized grids, our system encodes various symmetry, alignment, and hierarchy relations among the elements of a facade. During iterative editing, the user can specify different grids for which our system proposes new configurations. Editing progresses by selecting such grids and one of the proposed configurations.

SAFE: Structure-aware Facade Editing

Computer Graphic Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics), 2014

Abstract

Many man-made objects, in particular building facades, exhibit dominant structural relations such as symmetry and regularity. When editing these shapes, a common objective is to preserve these relations. However, often there are numerous plausible editing results that all preserve the desired structural relations of the input, creating ambiguity. We propose an interactive facade editing framework that explores this structural ambiguity. We first analyze the input in a semi-automatic manner to detect different groupings of the facade elements and the relations among them. We then provide an incremental editing process where a set of variations that preserve the detected relations in a particular grouping are generated at each step. Starting from one input example, our system can quickly generate various facade configurations.

Results

By activating different grids (colored) at each editing step, interesting facade variations can be generated.

Given the hierarchical grid structure, one can modify the main grid (yellow), the sub-grids (green and cyan), or both.